"Our vision is that every person can be a creator. That
every Xbox One can be used for development. That every game and
experience can take advantage of all of the features of Xbox One
and Xbox LIVE. This means self-publishing. This means Kinect, the
cloud, achievements. This means great discoverability on Xbox LIVE.
We'll have more details on the program and the timeline at Gamescom
in August."

That second sentence would seem to confirm an additional fact
dug up by Game Informer, which said that "every Xbox
One unit can be converted to a debug console." This would mean that
any Xbox One purchased at retail could be authorised by Microsoft
to play pre-release game code, thus making it much less expensive
to develop and test Xbox One games since specialised hardware would
not be required.

In contrast, Microsoft's chief rival in the console space, Sony,
made a huge to-do at the E3 Expo in June about its more
indie-friendly policies, bringing a parade of smaller developers on
stage to show their new games and extol the virtues of PlayStation
4 as a convenient, lucrative platform for developers to freely
self-publish their games.

Microsoft has a rather deep hole to climb out of, and we'll see
how it plans to do it at Gamescom.